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A-17<br />

school quality<br />

Subtopic Example topic raised in the<br />

National Dialogue<br />

Class size The Ministry should enforce<br />

smaller class sizes in schools to<br />

improve student outcomes.<br />

Student<br />

discipline<br />

The Ministry should give more<br />

attention to student discipline.<br />

ICT The Ministry should improve<br />

ICT facilities in all schools.<br />

Infrastructure The Ministry should convert<br />

all double-session schools<br />

to single-session schools to<br />

improve student outcomes.<br />

Performance<br />

management<br />

The Ministry should ensure<br />

schools have sufficient<br />

allocation for infrastructure<br />

maintenance.<br />

The Ministry should review<br />

KPIs to measure student<br />

performance. Current KPIs<br />

focus too much on academic<br />

results and examinations<br />

rather the more important<br />

issues of plummeting quality of<br />

education.<br />

Ministry response/action Reference<br />

Research shows that factors like class size have less impact<br />

on the quality of student outcomes versus factors like teacher<br />

quality. As such, the Ministry will be maintaining the current<br />

policy threshold of a maximum of 35 students per class. The<br />

focus for the Ministry will be on improving conditions in the<br />

11% of schools with class sizes of more than 35 students.<br />

The new school, district, and state dashboards to be rolled out<br />

in 2013 include a metric on disciplinary performance, which<br />

will be a focus area for school performance management<br />

The Ministry is rolling out 1BestariNet, a 4G network and<br />

virtual learning environment to all 10,000 schools by mid-<br />

2013. It will also look into increasing the number of computers<br />

in schools, and providing adequate training to teachers and<br />

schools to ensure that ICT can be embedded into day-to-day<br />

teaching and learning activities.<br />

The Ministry analysed performance of students in both single-<br />

and double-session schools and found student outcomes to be<br />

comparable on multiple dimensions: academic, co-curricular,<br />

and student discipline. A significant number of schools today<br />

are double-session schools, and there are significant cost<br />

implications on converting all these schools. As such, the<br />

Ministry will review school needs on a case-by-case basis to<br />

determine if concerns of overcrowding are best addressed<br />

by conversion, or if other measures such as the provision of<br />

additional classrooms may be more appropriate.<br />

The Ministry will continually review and provide an annual<br />

school maintenance budget moving forward.<br />

The Ministry has developed a comprehensive set of KPIs that<br />

have an increased focus on critical inputs that affect student<br />

outcomes, like number of hours teachers spend on teaching<br />

and learning and participation in co-curricular activities. It<br />

will also continue to benchmark performance of the entire<br />

system against international standards such as TIMMS and<br />

PISA, to ensure comparability with other school systems.<br />

Chapter 6<br />

Chapter 4<br />

Chapter 6<br />

Chapter 6<br />

Chapter 6<br />

Chapter 6 for revising<br />

Ministry<br />

KPIs, Chapter<br />

4 for revising<br />

curriculum and<br />

examinations

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